COACHING SPECTRUM - Coaching 3.0 widens its focus to add extra value to business challenges

Complicated and complex

Many organisations need to maneuver in different realities at the same time. These realities often follow different logic and it needs a specific mind-set to navigate them successfully.

On the one side organisations operate in a complicated world. By using knowledge and experience of the past, it is possible to find a good way forward to act in this reality. For being successful, organisations have developed internal structures and processes to develop, market, and distribute their products and services. In this setting, some specific rules of the game have proven to be very helpful:

• Setting SMART goals for a clear focus
• Utilizing best practices from the past
• Making internal procedures and processes more and more effective and efficient by applying methods such as performance or lean management
• Developing a hierarchical structure to streamline decision making

Such an organisation is well adapted to a world that develops in a rather consistent way.

However, on the other side, these organisations often need to deal with the challenges of a complex reality, described with the acronym VUCA. VUCA stands for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.

Any long-term planning often reaches its limits in this reality. The longer the plan is laid out, the less meaningful it becomes in a volatile environment. In order to be able to operate in this VUKA world, more agile approaches and methods are needed.

• In a fast-changing time, it often makes not so much sense to set SMART goals. Instead, it may help to keep an eye on one's direction by means of purpose or intention.
• Methods such as Design Thinking, Theory U and Generative Change try to facilitate creativity and innovation.
• Agile project management gets into implementation quickly and adapts the process on the run.
• Self-organised teams are given a lot of freedom to decide and plan without having to wait for information and decision to run through complicated hierarchical channels.
• Holacracy tries to build an entire organisation without a fixed leadership structure.

In a hybrid organisation, these two different realities live side by side. Where innovation and speed are required, the methods of a complex reality are used, and where consistency and stability are needed, the methods of the complicated reality come into play.

Such a hybrid organisation consciously tries to make productive use of the tensions that arise when these two worlds work side by side. At this level, coaching can generate immense added value. But for this, it needs to be liberated from the “box” of merely being a method to develop people and teams, organized by the HR department.

Challenges in Organisations

The scope of leadership challenges in a hybrid organisation is broader than in a “normal” organisation. Leadership needs to deal with two different operating modes, the complicated and complex at the same time. The challenges of the complicated reality, such as organising ongoing learning, developing people, and making sure that individuals and teams perform well are still important. But there are new challenges coming from the rather complex reality.

• In difficult circumstances, like dealing with the effects of the coronavirus or different expectations coming from Generation Y and Z, leaders need a much more individualized and sensitive way of building rapport and listening to the needs of co-workers.
• Due to the fast change of the environment, people can no longer build on their best practices of the past as a way forward, or on the approaches and explanations, they are used to. Old success stories don’t work anymore. In this setting, a transformation of mind-set often is needed.
• VUCA often puts people in a situation where they understand the challenges, but where there is no answer at this given moment. In such situations, a leader needs to find a way to stimulate innovative energy in a collaborative and co-creative process.

Coaching Spectrum

Coaching is probably the only profession working in or with organisations, that has developed a deep knowledge and well-proven tools to deal with the challenges described. And, over time, coaches have created very specific methods to deal with each of these challenges in a targeted manner. But as long as coaching is mainly orchestrated in an organisation by the HR department, you mainly will get development coaching.

Development Coaching is more or less the kind of coaching that found its way into the organisational reality some 30 years ago. And it was sufficient as long as the organisational circumstances could be described as complicated, but foreseeable. Content, structural and process knowledge was the main driver for success. But with content, structural and process knowledge, you will not successfully induce a transformation, co-create an innovation or help somebody through a personal crisis.

A huge success factor lies in merging coaches’ deep understanding of the human side of change with the knowledge and experience of the people from the business side. In this tandem approach, coaching can integrate all its deep understanding from different schools of social science, which are embedded in the approaches of the coaching spectrum:

• Skills Coaching is used in situations where it is important that a coachee learns and masters certain skills, methods, and procedures. This can be new IT knowledge or methodological knowledge about agile project management or the concept of Design Thinking. In skills coaching, the coach often has a good command of these skills, methods, and procedures himself and can accompany the coachee on their learning journey individually by using knowledge and understanding from the areas of pedagogy and learning psychology.
• Development coaching is characterized by supporting managers and employees when they need to grow into new roles or tasks. A coach will help set clear and realistic goals for development using methods like GROW (Goal, Reality, Options, Will-Do). In addition to the in-depth planning for the way forward, the coaching also supports the reflection process of the learning experiences, etc. This type of coaching is most similar to the original idea of coaching.
• Performance coaching focuses much more on organisational goals than on individual learning. Similar to a coach in sports, the performance coach often takes a more active role and tries to remove mental, communicative, cooperative, and motivational obstacles that stand in the way of success. Performance coaching often uses a lot of insights from sport and motivational psychology.
• Personal coaching focuses on what is helpful for the coachee at a given moment. It is used to support a coachee personally who for example is struggling with a professional challenge (Just think of all the people who needed to work from home due to Corona and are responsible for homeschooling and family affairs at the same time.) or when a personal crisis (like a loss of a family member) affects the professional performance. Just being present with the coachee in such a moment and really listening to his or her experience is key. For people with high emotional intelligence, this is often very easy, but for people, who look at the world through a mechanical mind-set and who constantly try to fix problems, this is almost impossible. But still, it is needed.
• Transformation coaching is always relevant when old, habitual assessments and procedures are no longer perceived as appropriate for a new situation. At that moment a fundamental paradigm shift is needed. The old habitual mind-set needs to be updated. Unlearning and leaving behind old success factors is just as important as developing a new and more appropriate understanding. As a mind-set is always embedded in the neuron structure of the brain, a transformation of mind-set will never work by reasoning and logic alone. Applying the knowledge of brain science, a transformation of mind-set always needs an experiential learning journey, building on curiosity, appreciation, and learning from mistakes.
• Emergent Coaching focuses on generating something completely new. Innovations do not happen as a continuous improvement but through radical rethinking and remaking. As our mind-set has the tendency to reshape our current experiences according to our existing belief system, we need to consciously step out of this frame to be able to “find” something new. Emergent Coaching supports the client in gaining a state of mind where finding new things is easier. Approaches like Generative Coaching call this the COACH-state. COACH stands for centered, open, aware, connected, holding.

For any organisation moving into the hybrid world, the challenges will become much more complex. Relying on the mind-set of the past will definitely not produce the answers for the future. Coaching 3.0 with its deep understanding of the human side of change, its proven approaches for transforming mind-set, and its widened focus towards business challenges can become a valuable partner on this specific journey.